The Global Citizen Music Festival Is Taking Over NYC For An Entire Week This Year

Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi speaks onstage at the 2016 Global Citizen Festival in Central Park to end extreme poverty by 2030 at Central Park on September 24, 2016, in New York City. / AFP / ANGELA WEISS (Photo credit should read ANGELA WEISS/AFP/Getty Images)

Since it first made a splashy debut back in 2012, the Global Citizen Festival has become one of the biggest and most highly-anticipated musical events of the year in New York City, and that’s no easy task. There is so much going on in the Big Apple every single day, so to not only grab the attention of tens of thousands of people for an entire day (and that doesn’t include the countless thousands watching online at home), but to use that time to educate them about what's happening in their world and to tell them what they can do to be a part of a solution is an incredible feat—one that the non-profit organization has nearly perfected by now.

Every September, the festival returns to the Great Lawn in Central Park, bringing some of the biggest and most beloved musical acts with it. The sixth annual Global Citizen Festival is set for this coming Saturday with artists like Stevie Wonder (who is returning to perform for the second time), Green Day, The Killers and The Chainsmokers all set to headline. That lineup would make any festival booker drool, but for Global Citizen, it’s not even the most exciting part of this year’s affair.

This time around, the organization has stepped up its game once again and has turned the Global Citizen Festival into a week-long movement, complete with nightly concerts, panels and plenty of events that allow anybody to both get involved and learn about the abject poverty that affects millions of people in their world. Appropriately titled Global Citizen Week, 30 events have been scheduled throughout New York City, all leading up to the big party on Saturday afternoon. A quick look at the calendar shows just how packed the next few days are, with everything from an International Conference on Sustainable Development at Columbia University to a TEDGlobal staging to concerts featuring pop stars like Demi Lovato and Andra Day, who have both supported Global Citizen for years now.

The list of events being hosted by the Global Citizen perfectly encapsulates what the non-profit organization does best: mixing serious, intelligent political advocacy with music so as to create a moment and a movement that everybody not only can be a part of, but one that many young people want to take part in. The annual festival combines pop stars with Nobel Prize winners, presidents and heads of state with those topping the charts. It’s a tough line to toe, but Global Citizen does it extremely well.

Global Citizen Week is just one way the group is working on bringing the fun to those who may not have had a chance to take part just yet. Chris Martin, frontman of the band Coldplay, signed on to help curate the festival for 15 years back in 2015, and as part of his inclusion, he’s working on bringing the festival itself to a new country every year. So far, the brand has made it to Canada and India, and there are plans to continue to grow, and hopefully, Global Citizen Week follows the concert everywhere it goes.

As if planning a party for 60,000 NYC residents and tacking on a few dozen events to warm the city up for one of the biggest days of the year wasn’t a Herculean enough task, Hugh Evans, CEO of Global Citizen, has promised to deliver something most Americans would believe almost impossible at this year’s staging: Democrats and Republicans coming together in support of one very important cause.

“What we're excited about is that the festival is going to demonstrate true bipartisan support for overseas development assistance,” Evans proudly claimed during a recent call. “We've already got 25 members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, who have declared their support.”

Global Citizen must now be the only music festival in the world that can count members of Congress as the opening act, and while seeing them on stage claiming to stand behind foreign aid will certainly be a wondeful moment for the cameras and it's sure to elicit a thunderous cheer from the audience, Evans and his team will have their work cut out for them when going up against some leaders who have decided that slashing money headed towards development in poor countries isn’t necessary. With the support of millions of people around the world who have all taken actions online, Global Citizen may have the collective power to make sure goals are met and funds go where they are most desperately needed...and seeing The Chainsmokers doesn’t hurt in the meantime.

I am a freelance music journalist based in New York City. My byline has appeared in The Huffington Post, Billboard, Mashable, Noisey, The Hollywood Reporter, MTV, Fuse, and dozens of other magazines and blogs around the world. I love following charts and the biggest and mos...